Levels and Departments
Sometimes as an artist there’s a choice that you have to make between skills and being a conceptual artist. The two can go together, but there are many overlaps on the Venn diagram. Sometimes it requires a complete 180 where you’re doing just one or the other–like giving up skill and becoming a full-time conceptual artist, or a conceptual artist going back to skill. Lately, I’ve done the latter because I think it’s more spiritually rewarding to actually work with your hands and skills, as opposed to just coming up with ideas, making prototypes, and hiring people to make them. There’s a lot of cognitive gear-shifting that has to go from working on conceptual levels and working on a skill level. In music, if you’re going to do something that’s complex and involves other people, you have to be more involved with the fundamentals; you have to be playing in-tune and in-time, which takes practice. It’s not like you’re going to take a break and come up with new ideas, at least not in the flow of the work. Conceptualization is a fairly short-term phase in creative work. It’s an important phase, but once you have the concept resolved, that part is finished.
There have been a number of artists who have gone from a skill-focused practice to conceptual, such as John Baldassari, who one day “cremated” all his paintings and started to do more conceptual work; Robert Irwin gave up painting in his twenties and started doing light and space art, which he became known for. I don’t think he ever went back to painting. I’ve also gone back and forth in my work. I tend to miss certain things over time. I’ve been doing more music lately because I don’t want to create more objects, but in the past couple weeks I’ve gotten some ideas for new assemblage artworks like I’ve done in the past. They’re very exciting and I’d like to get started on them, but then I get a nagging feeling that I don’t want to make more objects. I like the idea that work is more inert and experiential rather than object-based, but it’s still an allure for me. This relates to my 4 Levels Theory: Level 1 is the level of skill,
Level 4 is purely conceptual; Level 3 is greater skill and lots of concepts; Level 2 is more skill and some concepts. When I’m working on music it tends to take over my entire brain because there are certain things that I’m not good at and I have to practice. Coming up with song ideas is easy (sometimes too easy) but it’s the execution of those ideas and playing the instruments and recording them that becomes the hard work.
3/18/2021
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